Radio base station systems (RBSs) operate to provide communication for one or more wireless user equipment units over one or more radio access networks of a cellular communication system. A radio access network is used by service providers to establish one or more point-to-point communication paths, e.g., such as a communication between two smart phones, a smart phone and a data server, and the like. An RBS has one or more radio equipment control (REC) devices, one or more radio equipment (RE) devices connected to one or more antennas that are used to facilitate the point-to-point communication paths defined by the service providers. The REC devices operate to communicate with the radio access networks via a network interface and the RE devices operate in conjunction with the antennas to communicate with the wireless user equipment units, such as smart phones, via an air interface which transmits and receives signals over the one or more antennas. The REC and RE devices operate with each other via the one or more interface links. The point-to-point information that is transmitted is streaming information based upon a particular streaming protocol, wherein a streaming protocol is a continuous stream of information that cannot be put on hold and has no re-transmission capabilities and, as such the interface links need to be operational for all communication to keep data from being dropped.
A typical RBS has a REC connected to a RE via an interface link having properties that are defined during a negotiation process. The properties are based upon the requests of one or more service providers. For example, a particular interface link can communicate information for multiple service providers, such as ATT, Sprint, and the like, and the amount of data, e.g., the data rate, the link communicates for each service provider, and the allocation and quality of each service provider's bandwidth, with respect to individual point-to-point communications generally referred to as antenna carriers in the CPRI specification, is defined by the service provider. During operation of the RBS, antenna carrier information to be processed and transmitted in various antenna carriers over the interface link is received by the REC from a network interface. After processing the received information, it is stored by the REC in a transmit buffer before being transmitted to the RE over the interface link. Similarly, antenna carrier information from the RE is received by the REC at the interface link, and is stored by the REC in a receive buffer before additional processing and transmission over the network interface.
In certain circumstances, such as when a temporary high load on system busses of the REC hinder processing of information, a data under-run can occur in the transmit buffer that holds data for a specific antenna carrier prior to transmission over the interface link; and a data over-run can occur in the receive buffer that holds data for a specific antenna carrier prior to transmission over the network interface. Because the RBS has no way of identifying original good data from the harmed data, data corruption occurs. In order to return to normal operation after an over-run or under-run scenario, where the data transmitted over the link is received without a data violation (e.g. the received data being overwritten) in a synchronous way, a reconfiguration of the link is required. The communication of streaming information over the link must be stopped in order to reconfigure the link and the communication can only be restarted after the reconfiguration process has completed and at a specific communication data synchronization point. Such result in meaningful down time resulting in the loss of streaming data, and impacting the quality of service of the RBS.
The use of the same reference symbols in different drawings indicates similar or identical items.